Dialogues from the Hindi movie Sparsh (1982 ) :
Following is the meaning of a few dialogues from the movie I found insightful:
I had heard this many times in the past and I thought I had grasped it's meaning, but I was incorrect. Only recently did I realize the essence of it.
For a while I thought that if I reach a milestone in my life I would be happy and content, but that never happened. Once I reach the milestone, there is happiness and contentment and a sense of accomplishment for a brief period of time and then the mind wants to move to something else : a new pursuit. So I realize that as we pursue our different goals as part of our lives, we will collectively spend only a brief amount of time in those goal-achievement/fulfillment periods. Much of the time will be spent in the pursuit or the journey. So its a wise thing to enjoy the good and the ugly parts of the journey and it's wiser to chose those journey's that are meaningful to us. It would be very sorrowful to chose a journey which keeps you unhappy for most of the time, only for the sake of reaching a destination that is still meaningful.
We will never arrive to a place and stay there content/happy forever.
"The Importance of Being Earnest" is a play written by Oscar Wilde and I remember reading this in my middle or high school. My first encounter with the word "Earnest" was this and the mind has permanently linked the word with the above sentence. I don't remember anything about the play anymore. Perhaps I will read it again one day, but that's not the subject of this blog post.
This is the meaning of the word "Earnest" in its adjective form:
Ardent in the pursuit of an object; eager to obtain or do; zealous with sincerity; with hearty endeavor; heartfelt; fervent; hearty; -- used in a good sense.
I am realizing that all it matters is whether I have been earnest in all my dealings. How the outcomes are don't really matter as long as I have earnest effort into the dealing.
I desire this to be my personal standard. It will take practice, but this is my yearning.
Following are my notes from the book HO'OPONOPONO : The ancient Hawaiian practice of gratitude and forgiveness by Carole Berger.
"People can help you in many ways throughout life, but there are two things nobody can give you: curiosity and drive. They must be self-supplied.
If you are not interested and curious, all the information in the world can be at your fingertips, but it will be relatively useless. If you are not motivated and driven, whatever connections or opportunities are available to you will be rendered inert.
Now, you won't feel curious and driven about every area of life, and that's fine. But it really pays to find something that lights you up. This is one of the primary quests of life: to find the thing that ignites your curiosity and drive.
There are many recipes for success. There is no single way to win. But nearly all recipes include two ingredients: curiosity and drive."
source : https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/april-25-2024
If we view our differences (in various aspects, the things that seem to separate us from others) as our preferences (or our tastes, rather than our identities), I think there would be a lot of harmony between us.
In general we entertain and accept our different preferences and tastes more readily and don't feel threatened by those differences.
One of my favorite columnist is Arthur C Brooks. Publishes articles mostly related to human psychology.
A few lines from his recent article :
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/happiness-time-aging-mood/676964/
I have seen this phenomenon in people close to me who, in late middle age, made a choice to practice character virtues that enhanced life for others. Sure enough, in old age they were absolute superstars of goodness, remembered as such after death.
Start each day by imagining the person you want to be as the years go by: not ruminating on grievances, not wasting time being grumpy, and sharing words of kindness and encouragement with whomever you come across. Notice how this imagined version of yourself makes you feel. The idea is to have this vision become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, every night, think about ways you can be better still in these areas the next day.
And towards the end:
And therein lies the last lesson to help you prepare for your golden years: Start appreciating seniors more for their natural gifts. The practice of seeing yourself valuing old people will reprogram the way you think and feel about your own aging. That will allay your fears, and free you up to get on with the important business of becoming happier.
For some reason I have always connected with older folks, sometimes there's an urge to ask them questions as to how their life experience was, what were their good choices, what were their regrets, with the intent of learning from their experience. But with a little thought later, I realize that its good to listen to their stories just with the intent of listening ... just like it would be interesting to listen to younger kids describing their wonderful world... and not with the intent of learning. You could definitely borrow some lessons from their lives, but you got to live the life as it comes with a mix of planning ahead and a mix of being open to experiences and sail through the tempests as well as the placid blue waters of the ocean of life.
Santhosh recommend this book (Anne from Green Gables) to me and I borrowed it from the library and started reading it.
The book is based on the character of a 11 year-old (?) Orphan girl living near Nova Scotia in Canada during the 1900s. I found the book really interesting, many a times I would smile wholeheartedly reading through what Anne has to say in the book.. about her various imaginations... her expectations/desires/preferences and her attitude towards life. Quite simple but still beautiful. The fact that I have a daughter who is slightly younger than Anne, I guess makes it more interesting. Provides me a window through which I can peek into their beautiful world.
Some of what she says are quite mature for her age and I feel that's where the author has put her words through Anne.
Here are a few excerpts from the book, which I found worth documenting:
"You set your heart too much on things, Anne", said Marilla with a sigh. "I'm afraid there'll be a great many disappointments in store for you through life."
"Oh, Marilla, looking forward to things is half the pleasure of them." exclaimed Anne. "You mayn't get the things themselves; but nothing can prevent you from having the fun of looking forward to them. Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.' But I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed."
From a recent Wired Magazine this was what a 19 year old founder of ChatGPTZero said when asked about what he thinks about doing in life.
Chasing the Derivate
is what he said.
It's an interesting idea and seems a good philosophy to follow in life.
As per Khanacademy, this is the meaning of the mathematical term *Derivative*
The derivative of a function describes the function's instantaneous rate of change at a certain point. Another common interpretation is that the derivative gives us the slope of the line tangent to the function's graph at that point.
Pleasure or Pain is associated with Change in our state. If you are in the stable state and following a function which is a straight line, then the derivate of that function is 0 or a constant. And when you are in this state, then there's no excitement, and life gets boring.
This is my interpretation of what he meant.
But as a counterpoint, you can follow the path of a circle and keeping going along the circle and chasing the derivative, but why? Is life always going to be a chase? From one thing to the other, one experience to the other.. continue chasing the ever unsatisfactory impulses/desires?
I have been on goodreads for over a decade and over this period have found one particular user called Eric Graff quite interesting by reading his reviews.
Makes me think that he is a learned person. He sprinkle's his personal experience in his reviews and that makes it interesting.
Check this out to read the reviews:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/974210-erik-graff?order=d&sort=review&view=reviews
Some notes from the book by Alvin Toffler
First Wave (pre-Industrialization) : Two sectors of people. Sector A : produced for their own consumption. Sector B : Produced for trade or exchange. Sector A was huge and Sector B was tiny
Second Wave (Industrialization) : Most people were engaged in producing goods for others consumption and this gave the market the prominence. No longer people were self-sufficient.
A Market is not inherently capitalist. A marketplace existed long before capitalism. A marketplace is nothing more than an exchange network, a switchboard as it were through which goods and services, like messages, are routed to appropriate destinations.
The explosive expansion of the market contributed to the fastest rise in living standards the world had ever experienced.
One need scarcely be a Marxist to agree with The Communist Manifesto's famous accusation that the new society "left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. Personal relationships, family bonds, love, friendship, neighborly and community ties all became tinctured or corrupted by commercial self-interest".
For the obsessive concern with money, goods, and things is a reflection not of capitalism or socialism, but of industrialism. It is a reflection of the central role of the marketplace in all societies in which production is divorced from consumption, in which everyone is dependent upon the marketplace rather than on his or her own productive skills for the necessities of life. In such a society, irrespective of its political structure, not only products are bought, sold, traded, and exchanged, but labor, ideas, art, and souls as well.
Principles of Industrialization:
Industrialism, as we have seen, broke society into thousands of interlocking parts- factories, churches, schools, trade unions, prisons, hospitals, and the like. In doing so it shattered community life and culture. Somebody had to put things together in a different form.This need gave rise to many new kinds of specialists whose basic task was integration. These were the integrators. They defined roles and allocateed jobs. They set the rules under which organizations interacted. In both capitalist and socialist nations, it was the integrators who rose to the top.
Thus a new executive elite arose whose power rested no longer on ownership but rather on control of the integration process. The new power of the integrators was, perhaps, most clearly expressed by W. Michael Blumenthal, former U.S. Secrertary of the Treasury. Before entering government Blumenthal headed the Bendix Corporation. Once asked if he would some day like to own Bendix, Blumenthal replied : It's not ownership that counts -- it's the control. And as a Chief Executive that's what I have got ! We have a shareholder's meeting next week, and I have got 97 percent of the vote. I only own 8000 shares. Control is what's important to me.... To have the control over this large animal and to use it in a constructive way, that's what I want, rather than doing silly things that others want me to do.
Free marketers have argued that governments interfere with business. But left to private enterprise alone, industrialization would have come much slowly. Governments quickened the development of railroad. They built harbors, roads, canals and highways. The operated postal services and built or regulated telegraph, telephone, and broadcast systems. They applied foreign policy pressures and tariffs to aid industry. They subsidized energy and advanced technology, often through military channels. By setting up mass education systems, governments not only helped to machine youngsters for theri future roles in the industrial workforce (hence, in effect subsidizing industry) but also simultaneously encouraged the spread of the nucelar family form. By relieving the family of educational and other traditional functions, governments accelerated the adaptation of family structure to the needs of the factory system.
Time and again during the past 300 years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality. Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom. Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple the regime.
Yet each time the ultimate outcome was the same. Each time the rebels re-created, under their own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites and super-elites. For this integrational structure and the technicians of power who ruled it were as necessary to Second Wave Civilization as factories, fossil fules, or nuclear families. Industrialism and the full democarcy it promised were, in fact, incompatible.
"The Law of first Price" : Where no previous history of trade existed for a given commodity, the price set in the first transaction was crucial. Typically set in the absence of competition, almost any price was acceptable to a lord or tribal chief who regarded his local resources as valueless and found himself facing a regiment of trooops with with Gatling Guns.
Cultures that had subsisted for thousands of years in a self-sufficient manner, producing their own food supplies, were sucked willy-nilly into the world trade system and compelled to trade or perish.
Nevertheless, once torn out of self-sufficiency and complelled to produce for money and exchange, once encouraged or forced to reorganize their social structure around mining, for example, or plantation frarming., First Wave populations were plunged into economic dependence on a marketplace they could scarcely influence. Often their leaders were bribed, their cultures reidculed, their languages suppressed. Moreover, the colonial powers hammered a deep sense of pshychological ingeriority into the conquered people that stands even today as an obstacle to economic and social development.
In 1492, when Columbus first set foot in the New World, Europeans controlled only 9 percent of the globe. By 1801 they ruled the third. And by 1935 Europeans politically controlled 85 percent of the land surface of the earth and 70 percent of the population. Like Second Wave society itself, the world was divided into integratotrs and integratees.
As early as 1941 U.S financial strategists had begun to plan for a postwar reintegration of the world economy along lines more favorable to the United States. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, held under US leadership, 44 nations agreed to setup two key integrative structures - the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF compelled its member nations to peg their currency to the American Dollar or to gold - most of which was held by the United States. (By 1948, United States possessed 72 perecent of the whole world's gold reserves). Soon a third component was added to the system - GATT. This agreement promoted originally by the United States, set out to liberalize trade, which had the effect of making it difficult for the poorer, less technologically advanced countries to protect their tiny fledgling industries. The three structures were wired together by a rule that prohibited the World Bank from making loands to any country that refused to join th eIMF or to abide by the GATT.
Second-Wave civilization cut up and organized the world into discrete nation-states. Need the resourced of the rest of the world, it derw First Wave socieiteis and the remaining primiteve peoples of the world into the money system. It created a globally integrated marketplace. But rampanant industrialism was more than an economic, political, or social system. It was also a way of life and a way of thiniking. It produced a Second Wave mentality.
Three ideas that bound all second-wave nations together and differentiated them from the rest of the world:
Both Stories and Numbers have their importance. Can't recall where I heard about this, but the essence is that if you want to convey a long-lasting message, then it has to be crafted as a story that will appeal to the audience and hence will be with them for a longer time. The story touches to the right/emotional side of the brain.
But stories are anecdotes and very personal and don't apply to a lot of folks. So if you are trying to craft a public policy then stories are not very relevant. They only convey the experience of a small segment of the population. So you need to look at the numbers/data to make a policy/intervention. If you are caught in the story then you will lose sight of the overall impact/experience. Numbers and Data will show the right picture
When I read books, I don't remember the numbers/data but I retain the stories (used to convey a message) for a longer duration.
From an online newsletter :
(The source newsletter : https://edmondlau.substack.com/p/safe-to-fail)
Here's the list of books that have affected me:
Over the past 3 years, I have been spending significant time Reading books on various topics. Although I was always interested in reading : newspapers, magazines, online articles, blog posts, books, but the time I usually spent was quite less. But this has changed in the last 3 years. Since the pandemic started there's more time at my disposal to do some reading and to fill that time, I started borrowing books, buying used books libraries, used-book stores, used online books. With this change I can certainly say that I am an avid reader now :-)
I read... but I forget :-) so sometimes I wonder what I am gaining from this reading... but then I realize that there's on idea or a story from each book that remains in my mind .. which enriches me... challenges my assumptions...to re-evaluate my opinions and this is worth the time.
My underlying goal has always been to understand how the world operates... I will never be able to accomplish that, as that is very complex and a moving target ... but every step in that direction seems worthwhile...a hobby that it is to fill the time that I have.
Quote from the book "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler. The book was published in 1980.
No single world view can ever capture the whole truth. Only by applying multiple and temporary metaphors can we gain a rounded (if still incomplete) picture of the world. But to acknowledge this axiom is no the same as saying life is meaningless. Indeed, even if life is meaningless in some cosmic sense, we can and often do construct meaning, drawing it from decent social relations and picturing ourseleves as part of a larger drama - the coherent unfolding of history.
I really like the way the author uses his words to express his ideas with clarity.
This book has been a great influencer for me, revealing so many of new ideas that I wasn't aware of and also expressing some of the ideas that I have in an eloquent way.
Akshara completed here first 10KM run as part of the San Francisco Marathon on Jul 23, 2023 . I am happy and proud of her achievement.
She did this as part of BARFI program and raised 2696 USD to support farmers in India. Since farmers (in India) are impacted directly because of severe weather events, the funds will help organizations working for farmers to raise the awareness and drawing governments attention towards the need of safety programs. I would like to thank all folks in our circles who made the donations to encourage her as well as to support the cause.
From the time she registered to the event, she was very much interested in it and would get up early in the morning for the weekend runs with the BARFI group.
She was nervous as well as excited on the day of the run. The fact that she had prepared well ahead of the event helped in reducing the nervousness.
This aspect of being disciplined and thorough in her preparations, I believe she picked up from her mom.
An excellent summary of the book : The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle by Andy is here:
https://www.clues.life/book-reviews/the-power-of-now
Andy's site https://clues.life/ is a great resource as well
